


Some Protector Of the Small

by rapacityinblue



Category: Protector of the Small - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Bullying, F/M, Growing Old Together, Implied Character Death, Old Married Couple, So Married, ancient grandma kel, but not a super lot, kel doesn't put up with that, not even when she's an ancient grandma, original children - Freeform, past owen/margarry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-21
Updated: 2014-12-21
Packaged: 2018-03-02 14:16:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2814986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rapacityinblue/pseuds/rapacityinblue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once a year, every year, the great-great-grandchildren of Lord Wyldon of Cavall gather at his keep for a visit. This is wonderful for the children, but slightly less so for their parents and grandparents. What are two longsuffering knights to do in the face of such chaos?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Some Protector Of the Small

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vibishan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vibishan/gifts).



The keep at Cavall was not a welcoming place. Despite standing newer than many others -- Jesslaw and Mindelan among them -- it was drafty. Kel, who had always been the practical sort, thought a few tapestries would go a long way toward warming the chilly stone walls, but Owen wouldn't hear of it. "Where's the fun in that?" he chided, the twinkle in his eye the same as it had been in the eyes of the boy she'd known so many years ago. "It's a grand adventure, isn't it? I don't know of a single hero who's story started out in a nice warm bed!" 

"Mine did," she told him, tartly. "And so did yours. You haven't slept in a cold camp in twenty years." 

But there would never be any convincing her husband when it came to matters of great romance. She'd given up on trying long ago, and he had laughed and kissed her, and gone about his way. 

The good thing about the keep was that it was quiet, at least. You'd never know from sound alone that there were dozens of children barreling through the halls, twice as many pups and yearlings at their heels. It was like this every year when they came to Cavall. Lord Wyldon would have agreed with her about the tapestries, she thought. But Lord Wyldon had only daughters to succeed him, and each of them a husband and children and grandchildren her own. When the whole clan descended on the keep, it quickly turned the well-ordered home to madness. Thank goodness, Kel thought, they only taxed the poor housekeeper this way once a year. 

When last she'd seen her own three they'd been neck deep in the chaos. Probably causing it. Irenne'd had at least three of this year's litter eating out of her hands from the moment she'd arrived in her mother's tow, quite literally. The girl was only three, yet hounds of all kinds doted on her, even the old and surly ones who turned their lips up at Kel when she approached. Owen insisted she was just a throwback to her grandmother, but Kel made a note to have a word with her mother when time allowed. They'd never had wild magic in the family before, but there was no telling, not with the kind of chaos Kel's life invited.

As for Mako and Shiki, they were larger and thus, harder to keep track of. The last time Kel had seen them had been a day and a half ago, when their parents had arrived, and soon after her two eldest grandchildren had disappeared, swallowed by a mob of their cousins. The older she got, the more children there seemed to be, roaming the halls of the keep in packs. Occasionally the corridor above her would thump, and the stones of the ceiling would shake dust down onto the pages of her books, where she sat reading in the library. (The only warm room in this drafty castle.) Sometimes she thought about going to investigate, and maybe toward the end of the visit she would. But she wasn't sufficiently concerned, or bored, to motivate her yet. And there was a blessed warmth in knowing that someone else could handle it. _Would_ handle it. Age, after all, came with privileges. 

(And if no one had told her husband -- explaining why he was as caught up in the madness and tussle as the children and their parents -- then Kel wasn't going to be the one to enlighten him. She'd earned a few days of quiet.) 

Peace was a funny thing, though. As soon as she'd started thinking about how nice it was in her library, alone, quiet, _warm_ , that was when they found her. It started with just a thump down the hall. Then the sound of screaming, a girl's screaming. Irenne's screaming. And Kel was on her feet, reaching for the sword she still carried. Of course it wasn't there. This wasn't a battle or a border skirmish or even travel along the King's Road; it was a family holding deep within the borders of Tortall. No one would lay attack to Cavall even if they could reach it, which obviously, they couldn't. 

Still she stayed tense, every muscle and nerve battle ready, as the ruckus in the hallway grew louder. There was no need to go explore when clearly they were making their way right to her. Indeed, a moment later, the door to the library burst open, and the children made their way in in a clamor. Irenne was at the head, with four of her cousins in hot pursuit. Kel thought they were Cathrea's line, though honestly, she couldn't be entirely sure. There were simply too many of them all to be expected to keep track. 

Irenne's cheeks were red and hot, and her face screwed up with rage. Her tears, Kel thought, were more that and frustration. Not injury or pain for what she could see, as she studied her youngest granddaughter. All of the children scuttled to stop themselves as they poured into the room, almost on top of her. Kel held her ground, and pulled herself up to her full height. She locked eyes with each of the pursuers, a trick she'd learned when she was still teaching arms at the palace. A trick she'd learned, really, as a student at the palace. She almost ruined it with a smile. 

"I trust," she said, turning to each child in turn, "that there's a very reasonable explanation for all of this."

Children, she thought, moved remarkably fast when they wished to get out from under the critical eye of an adult. She was sure she'd never moved that fast. 

With the older four gone, she was left with a problem. A teary-eyed, hiccuping problem, whose emotions were finally getting the better of her. Whatever fury had motivated Irenne out of wherever she'd been playing, it seemed gone now. The small girl wrapped small arms around Kel's thigh and wailed into her pants, leaving them damp. She couldn't get Irenne to release enough to let her crouch, so there wasn't much else to do besides pat her on the back, a bit awkwardly, and wait for the tears to spend themselves. 

In between snorts and sobs the girl was stammering out words -- wailing them, really, and Kel was astonished to find that she'd lost the habit of interpreting Hysterical Toddler. She raised her eyes to the doorway and they were met by warm and playful brown eyes in turn. With no small amount of relief, she detached the girl and passed her to the loving arms of her grandfather. 

"Deep breaths, now, Rennie," Owen said, bouncing her in his arms. "It will be alright." 

But sympathy only made the girl wail louder. Gradually, Owen was able to coax the story out of her. Of the new litter just whelped in the kennels below. From what Kel was able to gather, the older children had been teasing her, saying that the pups were going to be sent away. "They said --" Irenne paused for jagged breath. "They said they weren't any good because you couldn't breed them, so they'd have to be sold off. They said 'that's what you do with mongrel blood.'" 

Owen turned a shade of red Kel associated with tantrums to rival those of her granddaughter. But Owen wasn't the boy he'd once been, and even though she knew he was angry (as angry as she was, probably) he didn't let it sound in his voice. "Well, they might be sold, like the pups from any litter. Maybe they'll go to live in the halls of great ladies, or with your auntie and uncle at Mindelan, or even at the palace, where they'll sleep at queen Shinkokami's feet on silk pillows. It'll be jolly for them. Loads more fun than living in the kennels here to whelp the next litter of pups, I think." 

As he spoke, the girl he held quieted, until the only sound in the library was her rough inhalations and the occasional thump from the rabble above. "Really?" she asked. Her cheeks were still red from her tantrum, but her eyes were drying. 

"Really!" Owen said. "It'll be an adventure for them!" 

By the time he set her down again her eyes were clear, and she tore from the library with a fresh giggle. Headed, Kel imagined, back to the kennels. She didn't imagine much would keep the girl away, with a fresh, squirming pile of puppies to be had. 

With Irenne soothed, she was more worried about her husband. She knew what he looked like when he was angry, and he knew what he was likely to do. 

"I'd have a word with their mothers," she said, moving towards him with slow and even paces. As if Owen was a horse she had to be careful not to spook. It was probably better that she handle this. She was far enough outside the family not to stir the pot, and she was more likely than Owen to keep her temper if cruel things were said. She'd heard worse said about herself since becoming a squire. "I don't know that I remember who I should speak to, though."

She laid a hand on his shoulder, and slowly, Owen began to relax. "Well, I didn't see the culprits," he said. He leaned into her, and she leaned back, a warm, familiar weight against her side and shoulder. "But point them out to me at dinner and I'll set you right." 

The words 'mongrel blood' rang in her head, and she put them aside. There was no use worrying over what you couldn't change and no use fretting over what you were going to change. When she looked back at Owen, he was grinning. 

"Why go to their mothers? Getting too old to set the bullies right yourself?" 

When she'd first met him, Owen had been a chubby, freckled scrap of a page. Long years of labor had turned the weight to muscle, which surprisingly few years had softened up again. Kel found one particularly tender spot beneath his ribs and drove her elbow into it. Lovingly. It only set him to outright laughter. 

"And the look on your face when I got here, Kel! Give you a Scanran raiding party or a band of bloodthirsty Immortals any day, eh? Hordes and hordes of pages you taught the glaive and sword and chivalry, and not one of them ever cried on you, Lady Knight?"

"I can handle them when they're bigger," she responded, indignant despite herself. "I don't know what I'm meant to do with them when they're that size!" 

"Some Protector of the Small," Owen chortled, and Kel found herself smiling to. As she always had, when Owen got like this. 

Laughter took them over to the couch, and when it faded they sat together in comfortable silence, Kel leaning into her husband's bulk and once again feeling the comfort of that weight returned. 

Silence was welcome to her, but it had never been quite as friendly to Owen. She wasn't surprised that he was the one who broke it. "Kel," he said, a frown wrinkling up his nose. For just a moment he looked so like the boy she'd first met all those years ago, ready to chase after the pages three times his size and give them a proper beating. Kel was seized by the very sudden desire to kiss him, which she wasn't about to do in the middle of Lord Wyldon's library, because it would always be Lord Wyldon's library no matter how old she got. But later. "What they said about mongrel blood--" 

"Maybe I ought to give them a beating," she teased. "What was it you always used to say? A jolly row." 

"You can't say they haven't got it coming," Owen said. 

But how, she wondered, were you supposed to hold seven and eight year olds accountable for the poison whispered in their ears by adults? It had seemed so much simpler when she herself was seven or eight. "It's not the kids who need a walloping," she said. Cathrea, in particular, had never been particularly happy to see her brother-in-law remarry after Margarry's death. 

"I'll set her right in the morning," Owen said, and Kel knew he was thinking the same thing. 

She would probably never be as comfortable saying out loud what she felt as he was, but that was okay. He knew it, just the way she knew that he would never stop throwing himself at fights, even the ones he couldn't win, when he thought it was right. "I don't know many men who'd marry a woman after she'd had another man's child," she told him with a kiss on his cheek. It must have been enough, because Owen turned very pink, which she knew meant he was happy and a little embarrassed but he didn't want her to know either of those things. So she pretended that she didn't. 

"Well," he said, "I don't know many men who wouldn't want to marry a fierce and brave knight." 

"Neither do I," she said, and decided that maybe it would be alright if she kissed him in Lord Wyldon's library after all. Just this once.

**Author's Note:**

> Dear Vibishan, 
> 
> I loved your idea of Kel and Owen as comfortable old marrieds with kids of their own, but I didn't want to stray too far from canon. So instead of children, you got Kel and Owen as comfortable old children with a whole pack of grandkids. Some knowledge of Lord Wyldon's family is necessary to piece together all the relationships here, but I tried to make it clear. Needless to say I love the idea that Wyldon got stuck with a pack of girls, and Owen ends up being the son he never had -- thanks to Kel's meddling, of course. And what would the holidays be like without some awkward family dynamics? 
> 
> I also unabashedly love the idea of Kel and Owen finding each other later in life, because I don't see them as a "first love" sort of thing (maybe more on Owen's side than Kel's) but definitely a "forever love". As you pointed out, they really balance each other in all the important ways, and I wanted to show a relationship that was really rooted in that, and where they could still go out and be their own people but always have the comfort of each other to turn to. 
> 
> Hopefully this satisfies your urge for Kel/Owen shipfic! I really enjoyed the prompt and I hope you like what I came up with. Happy holidays and happy yuletide!!


End file.
